digital literacy

In the second edition of their influential book New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning, Lankshear and Knobel argued that engagement with these practices was “largely confined to learners’ lives in spaces outside of schools.” That was nearly 10 years ago, and in some respects, very little has changed. In many classrooms, there is a lot more technology than there was back then; for instance, the provision of interactive whiteboards, desktops, laptops, and portable devices is better, and there is a greater variety of software and hardware on offer. Yet, even when equipment is available, up to date, and in good working order, problems of curricular integration still arise. Despite all the rhetoric about the importance of new or digital literacies in education, recent curricular reforms and their associated assessment regimes have tended to privilege traditional literacy skills and printed text. An expansive view of new literacies in practice seems hard to realize. Why should this be the case?

E-Lit is yet to be discovered by many scholars, educators and students at different levels of education but the impact it has had on the teaching and learning of those who have already come across this field is worth sharing in order to broaden not only the recognition of the field but the impact it might have in the teaching and learning of modern languages in our fast-evolving technological societies. In light of the benefits that a critical study of e-lit works presents, this panel addresses three scenarios where the teaching and learning of e-lit has proven a challenging yet productive path to broaden educators and students’ horizons alike. Whereas one presentation seeks to reflect on the training of educators at the elementary and high school level in literary and digital literacy, the other two presentations discuss scenarios where the teaching of e-lit in higher education has demonstrated how e-lit with its richness opens the way for interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and learning, approaches that emphasize the digital and the literary (Saum- Pascual, 2017).How do educators and students take advantage of the affordances of the different platforms either to teach or analyze e-lit? What does a critical interdisciplinary analysis of e-it works bring to a modern language course?

Recent researches have revealed some of the factors that seem to hinder both the production of digital literary contents for young readers and their diffusion in the school context. Within the framework of the project led by Nathalie Lacelle (2017-2020) and dedicated to accompanying the development of digital children’s publishing initiatives in Quebec, three major issues have particularly emerged:- a lack of knowledge about the current editorial offer, by educators, librarians and, more generally, by common readers;- a difficulty in including e-literary creations in the school canon and in conceiving pertinent educative materials, that seems to be mostly provoked by an unfamiliarity with the poetics and the rhetoric of digital texts;- a lack of understanding, by creators and publishers, of the young readers’ psycho-cognitive and affective specificities, as well as of the constraints and conditions that define the school reading process.In order to reduce these limitations, to stimulate the reading practices and, at the same time, to develop young readers’ competencies in digital literacy, a website dedicated to children’s digital literature has been conceived, in partnership with the Littérature Québecoise Mobile group, directed by Bertrand Gervais: Lab-yrinthe.The website is intended as a virtual laboratory on contemporary children’s digital literary phenomena and aims at providing information based on scientific observations, as well as conceptual and didactic tools to educators, publishers and researchers.More particularly, Lab-yrinthe presents a catalog of heterogeneous digital literary works produced or distributed in Quebec, including enriched books, mobile apps, narrative video games, geolocated narrations, augmented reality creations, interactive theater performances, virtual installations and podcasts. Each creation is analyzed from a set of descriptive parameters conceived by the research team (Acerra, Lacelle et al., 2021) with the purpose to illustrate the semiotic, multimodal and technological materials of the text, as well as the poetic or rhetoric effects of their combinations. From this basis, some educational and didactic suggestions are depicted: teachers can refer to this section to find a reading key of the digital work and, at the same time, to have clear examples of the possible exploitations of a digital writing process in the school context.Finally, a dedicated section of the Lab-yrinthe website presents the main co-creation and co-production projects, carried out with partners from the cultural industry (ranging from the National television, to the Montréal Poetry Festival and Bookfair, from digital and analog publishers to National libraries and archives). In this case, both the actors, the contents and the distribution conditions are presented as indicators of the current orientations of the digital publishing field.BibliographyAcerra, E., Lacelle, N., et al. (2021, in press). « Décrire les œuvres littéraires numériques pour la jeunesse », Lire, comprendre, interpréter et apprécier des supports composites, La Lettre de l’AIRDF, n° 68.Lacelle, N., et al. (2017-2020). Soutien au développement de démarches d’édition numérique jeunesse au Québec à partir de pratiques favorables de production, diffusion et réception. Research project financed by the Fonds de Recherche Société et Culture (Québec).

(Source: Authors' own abstract)

The paper would be a presentation, with video, on the subject of Splatter Semiotics, and The Semiotics of Splatter, which is concerned with 'messy' digital lit / digital literacy. It will discuss Trump's tweets, Russian hacking, blockchain, and disruptive technologies which possess 'spread' as, not only a form of digital literature, but also a new and dangerous cultural horizon, one that threatens the very foundations of democratic institutions. This work stems out of my thinking about 'gamespace / edgespace / blankspace' that I've presented at other conferences (including ELO); the three terms reference gaming and habitus as forms of political, social, and artistic thinking; I would include a summary of this work and indicate its relationship and dissolution in splatter. ('Gamespace' is defined as a rule-governed domain; the term applies to anything from a chessboard to a school community. 'Edgespace' is the borderlands of the gamespace; it's always problematic, and might exist within competing regimes. In the motion capture work I've done, edgespace references the boundaries of the architecture for capture, and what happens at the boundaries appears to 'break' the capture representation. 'Blankspace' then indicates how edgespace is 'filled in,' how the imaginary operates there. I use the terms in considerations of Arctic and Antarctic mappings, virtual worlds, and so forth. Finally, the semiotics of splatter considers splatter as world-breaking and fast-forward tendencies towards mobile boundary closures; this leads to splatter semiotics, where the terms form a field that remains always already ruptured. This is the semiosis of the overloaded or hacked network, the network of fake news and fake apps, the explosive and turbulent behavior of the mediasphere itself. I see this field as a form of politicized digital literature, where words lose meaning, become puncta (Barthes) or tokens, where language splays. The talk will be laptop-dependent; the concepts are easiest to grasp through text-imagery, which will include maps, tweets, word grids, virtual-world video, and so forth.

I made my first web-based art work in 1995. It’s still online, it still works. The internet has changed a lot since then, but the DIY aesthetics and practices of that era have by no means disappeared. In today’s highly commercialised web of proprietary applications, Content Management Systems, WYSIWYG editors, and digital publishers, it becomes an increasingly radical act to hand-code and self-publish experimental web art and writing projects. Drawing upon Olia Lialina’s essay “A Vernacular Web” (2010), this paper makes correlations between the early ‘amateur’ web and today’s maker and open source movements. Examples of the persistence of Web 1.0 are presented, from the massive Ubu Web site which its founder boasts, ‘is still hand-coded in html 1.0 in bbedit, from templates made in 1996,’ to the tiny anti-social network TILDE.CLUB, where small experimental websites are hosted on one ‘totally standard unix computer.’ In addition to the slow writing of the web through hand coding, the practice of appropriating existing source code is discussed in relation to Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge (2008), which has been remixed dozens of times. And, drawing upon Lori Emerson’s book Reading Writing Interfaces (2014), it is argued that experimental web-based works such as Daniel Eatock’s The One Mile Scroll (2008), which transforms virtual space into an actual, physical distance, force slow reading by challenge conventions of web design.

What does the category of the literary give to digital humanities? Nothing and everything. This essay considers the "idiocy" of the literary: its unaccountable singularity, which guarantees that we continue to return to it as a source, inspiration, and challenge. As a consequence, digital humanities is inspired and irritated by the literary.

My essay shows this in three ways. First, through a speculative exploration of the relation between digital humanities and the category of "the literary." Second, through a quick survey of the use of literature in digital humanities project. Thirdly, through a specific examination of TEI and character rendering as digital humanities concerns that necessarily engage with the literary. Once again, the literary remains singular and not abstract, literal in a way that challenges and provokes us towards new digital humanities work.